How to Hack Your Front-End Career With UX
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You must be thinking that as a front-end developer, you are developing websites / online products using HTML, CSS-styling, JavaScript and other different Frameworks to make them good looking by implementing user interfaces from the mockups.
But! That’s not what UX is all about.
And in this post, I would like to voice my opinion that UX design skills are crucial for a front-end developer. To learn UX is the right thing to do if you want to improve your career path, your knowledge, to get a higher position, or become a freelancer.
Just for the record, this post is not about how to switch from a web developer to a UX designer. It’s more about how understanding user experience would make you a better developer.
We know, front-end developers can build fantastic UIs with the technologies listed above, but the primary target of a lot of companies’ products is to get more and more user satisfaction with the product. So, the traditional UX tasks are research, use cases, user personas, testing, analytics, communication/interviews with the potential customers.
So, if you would like to learn UX design deeply, then start doing that step by step:
Take one or two UX courses to understand the principles and concepts of UX. Check out posts on Medium, Smashing Magazine, etc. There are lots of resources. Perform UX research for your side projects. It will only make you better at your job. The fields are close, and if you work with UX-designers team, you can try to recommend changes in the interface and get feedback afterward. Practice, practice, and more practice. Wherever you find bad UX, you can make a practice project from it. That would help you to improve the thinking process and gain UX skills. Finally, stay focused on the user. It doesn’t matter how much experience you gain as a UX designer, the primary job for developers and UX designers is to solve user needs.
Thank you for reading!
If you would like to know about my professional journey, feel free to contact me on Twitter or Instagram.
This post was originally published on Prototypr
